Nine Summers Read online

  ‘Would you like to open a bottle of wine?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Chicken soup, God’s panacea for everything, poached salmon, salad and poached pears.’

  ‘OK, I’ll open a white.’

  After dinner I saw Felix look intently at the ‘Travel’ section of the Observer. ‘We’ve often said we should go up the Nile sometime. This’d be a good time.’

  ‘But we’re going to Sydney in four weeks.’

  ‘That’s in four weeks, we could go before that.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit much for you? In any case I’d rather go to Sicily.’

  ‘I’d rather go to Sicily too, but this is the wrong time of the year.’

  ****

  Dear Kids,

  Dad is well, if a little more frail than usual. He’d suspected heart trouble for much longer than he admitted to me. Another worrying time is over. All his recent tests are OK. And yet, although I haven’t mentioned it to Dad, I worry about going back to the boat next year. Although the cardiologist said the ballooning and stenting should prevent an attack, I can’t imagine what I’d do if Dad had a heart attack on the boat. I can’t help worrying.

  Dad’s booked a ten-day trip up the Nile before we’re off to Sydney. I’m not as keen as he is, but then he’s pretty manic at the moment. All I’m looking forward to is to get home and see you all.

  Two weeks later:

  We’re back from Egypt. It was interesting, apart from the fact that Dad had a bad chest and high temperature, started on antibiotics, was in bed three days, and missed the Valley of the Kings. Shall tell you more when we see you. Meanwhile I’ll rush this to the post office.

  Lots of love, Mum

  As we waited for the luggage at Sydney airport, Felix’s face was grey, he looked exhausted.

  ‘Let me take the case off the carousel,’ I said.

  ‘No! It’d wreck your neck.’

  ‘Well, let me ask that young man to do it for us.’

  ‘No!’ He was emphatic.

  The family was in the arrivals hall to meet us. Emma and Jackie looked tall, slim and more grown up.

  ‘Hey, Pop! There are great plans afoot for your 70th birthday party. We’ll need to dig out old photos.’ That was Julie at her most enthusiastic.

  Some days later, Felix didn’t feel well. He said he felt nauseated, and spent the morning lying on the settee in the lounge. Suddenly he called me. His tone was strange.

  ‘What’s wrong? You look in pain,’ I said when I saw him. ‘I’m having a heart attack, I’ll call an ambulance.’

  ‘I’ll call.’

  ‘No, I’d better call.’ He got up, phoned emergency and spoke lucidly about what was happening. ‘They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.’ There was no panic, no hysteria. He went back to lie down.

  ‘Thank God we’re in Sydney!’

  ‘I guess so,’ he muttered.

  The ambulance arrived. ‘Take these tablets, Mr Huber, they’ll relieve the pain.’ The paramedics rushed him to St Vincent’s Coronary Care Unit.

  ‘If you’ve never had cardiac problems until recently, then my guess is that it’s due to the radiotherapy you’ve had to the oesophagus,’ the cardiologist said.

  I spent the following day with Felix as he was wheeled from one test to the next.

  ‘We’ve looked at all the tests, Felix, and I’m afraid you’ll need to have a bypass. We’ve put you on the list for Wednesday.’ The cardiac surgeon was a tall, dour, laconic man. I started to shake. Although I’d coped with medical problems when the two of us were on our own, in Sydney I relied on David and let him be the intermediary between Felix and the surgeon.

  Two days later, Felix was wheeled into the operating theatre. I waited in a nearby room with a young woman whose husband was having a heart transplant. We were both silent and nervous. After some hours I noticed Felix’s surgeon pass along the corridor. I ran after him.

  ‘Excuse me, can you tell me how the operation went?’

  He stopped, looking awkward and painfully shy. ‘He’ll be all right,’ he said, and moved on.

  ‘You can come into the post-op intensive care now, Mrs Huber,’ the nurse said. The ward was new, and the sun was streaming in. Felix, looking pale and cadaverous, was hooked up to monitors, drips and tubes. I must have looked shocked.

  ‘He’s quite all right, Mrs Huber. They all look like that after the operation, but there’s nothing to worry about,’ the nurse said. ‘You can sit down, it’ll take a while before he wakes up.’ I was grateful for the kind words, they reminded me of the kindness of the nurses in Montpellier. She moved on, ‘Mr Smith, try to cough for me, come on…take a big breath…’

  There was constant movement as the staff rushed from bed to bed, metal bowls clanked, monitors beeped and patients groaned. Relatives tip-toed in and out, doctors in operating gowns came and went, and patients were wheeled in and out.

  A railway station, I thought, a life and death railway station. The man whose wife had shared the waiting room with me was wheeled in. He had a new heart. I wondered what it would be like to have someone else’s heart. Did that make you feel different? He looked so young. A nurse pulled up a chair for his wife, who sat down and cried quietly by his bedside.

  The recovery was a bumpy ride. Felix’s pulse was too high and his heart was racing uncontrollably. I was anxious and depressed, and sat next to him in intensive care much of the time. But three days later he had improved and was shifted into an ordinary ward. A week after the operation he was back home.

  ‘Thank God.’ I burst into tears. Felix smiled. Subdued, he looked frail and had lost weight, but he was glad to be home.

  ‘It’s great to have family around, to be together. Three days to your birthday.’ I gave Felix a hug. ‘What sort of cake would you like?’

  ‘The usual, of course, orange and almond chocolate cake.’

  ‘Chocolate cake? Now, after a bypass?’

  ‘You bet!’

  When I opened the door on his birthday, Julie stood there with her two poodles, Jackie and Emma with their labrador, all three with ribbons and waving tails. It was a quieter birthday than had originally been planned. Only family. The day after Felix’s birthday we started going on short walks. We had had to postpone our flight back to London by two weeks. I wanted to wait longer but Felix was adamant that we return.

  I’d been thinking hard about the way we had lived during the previous nine years, and one day I broached the subject. ‘Puss, we’ve had a long lucky spell sailing. I don’t think we should test our luck too far. I wouldn’t be happy sailing any more. I’d be too worried.’

  He took a long time to answer. ‘That’s fair enough. I guess we’ll have to sell Galatea.’

  ****

  ‘Under no circumstances are you to lift your luggage at the airport,’ the cardiologist had told him. ‘It’s only four weeks since your bypass.’ By the time we reached London, Felix was frailer than I’d ever seen him. Stooped, his cheeks caved in and black rings round his eyes, he coughed incessantly.

  During the previous weeks I’d been surrounded by family. Now, I was aware how alone I was. Felix was quiet and hardly spoke. If he stays like this, I thought, I won’t be able to cope. But when he’d recovered from the jet lag, he was more like his old self. ‘I’m going to phone the shipbrokers in Marmaris, and tell them that Galatea is for sale.’ I was shocked by the way he said it. As if he were selling a car. Of course I’d known that it would come to this. But I didn’t want to hear the conversation. I didn’t want to hear him say, ‘Hello, Frank, Felix here…Unfortunately, we won’t be sailing any more, I’ve had a heart problem…’

  We were selling a piece of ourselves. Galatea wasn’t an inanimate object. For us, she was real, alive. Selling her was like selling an old faithful dog, one who had protected us, welcomed us each time we returned, and given us joy, a new lease on life. It spelled the end of an era, an acceptance of the inevitable, moving along the conveyor belt tha
t travels inexorably in one direction. I ran down the stairs and rushed out to the canal, to the barges. When I returned, Felix was placid and composed, reading the paper.

  ‘Hi, honey.’ He looked relieved, as if he’d shed a load. So different from what I’d expected. I fell into his arms. ‘We’ve been so lucky…’ I said, but couldn’t go on.

  ‘When we started, we thought we’d have two or three years. In fact, we’ve had so much longer…and knowing us, we’ll find a new way to live the next few years,’ Felix finished the sentence for me.

  ‘There are some really good deals for Berlin. Would you consider going there?’ Felix was looking through the ‘Travel’

  section in the Guardian. ‘I’ll never forget the night the Berlin Wall fell. What times these have been! And we’ve been right here. Gorbachev, Perestroika, Glasnost, the end of the Cold War. What do you say, shall I see what I can do about Berlin?’

  ‘It’d be interesting, although I’d rather go to Sicily,’ I said. ‘I’d rather go to Sicily too, but it’s not a good time of the year. Too hot.’

  ‘Yes, OK, Berlin. But you’ll have to do something about your cough first.’

  ‘All right, I’ll see the GP.’

  It took Felix a day to book a flight to Berlin, a car and hotels.

  The guide, an intelligent young woman with long fair hair and lively blue eyes, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with ‘Berlin the Erotic City’ across the front, enjoyed showing the small bus-load of tourists her city. ‘Berlin is a relatively “new” city, dating from the eighteenth century when it was the capital of Prussia. In 1871 it became the capital of Germany. After 1945 it was divided into four parts. Since 1990 it has again become the capital of a unified Germany. We’ll visit the museums…’

  In the late afternoon we walked by ourselves along Unter den Linden towards the Brandenburger Tor. Felix stopped suddenly. ‘That’s the Adlon Hotel, Hitler’s favourite, where the leadership liked to get together.’ He looked pale and tired.

  ‘Let’s sit down and have something to drink,’ I suggested. ‘Yes, outside. It’s such a balmy evening.’

  We found an outdoor café with cane furniture and pot plants. It was crowded. A waiter with a Slavic accent took our order. We watched the passing parade, sipped Campari and soda, and nibbled nuts.

  ‘The people look so content. Look at the clowns, the street theatre…it’s great. Like the 1920s revisited…’ I commented.

  ‘You know, I can’t believe I’m sitting here in Berlin, 60 years after Kristallnacht. I remember it so clearly. I was 11, and I can still see Mum answering the knock on the door the morning after Kristallnacht, and seeing two Nazi officers. They’d come to pick up Dad, and take him to a concentration camp. They said they’d wait while he packed a small bag.

  ‘I was standing at the dining table with my electric trains. Then, while they waited for Dad to pack his bag, they said they wanted to play trains with me!’

  I’d heard that story before, but now it seemed to plague him. He needed to talk about it. I took his hand.

  ‘The whole of the following week, Mum and I ran from police station to police station trying to find him, but we couldn’t. Then one day he came home. Shattered. He’d been with hundreds of others, forced to do knee bends all day. On that morning the Nazis asked the people whether any of them had good reasons why they should be let go. They’d arrested so many after Kristallnacht, they didn’t have enough trains to transport them all to Buchenwald, so they were prepared to release some of them. Dad happened to have the ship’s tickets to Australia in his pocket, so he was freed, on condition that he was out of Austria within 24 hours. He left with a small group on the following morning and crossed the mountains illegally to Switzerland…

  ‘I’d had a normal, happy childhood in Vienna, but that was the day I grew up. And now here I am, a 70-year-old man, sitting in a café in Berlin watching clowns and street theatre.’

  I got up. ‘Let’s go, Puss.’

  Hi Kids,

  Berlin wasn’t emotionally easy for Dad, in spite of the Pergamon, Nefertiti and the wonderful galleries. Too many traumatic old memories. After Berlin we drove on to Leipzig. Hard to describe our feelings as we entered Bach’s St Thomas Church, just as an organ burst into a cantata and filled the church.

  Leipzig is so full of musical ghosts. Mahler composed his First Symphony during his two years there, and Schubert also spent time here. Mendelssohn started the Leipzig Conservatory and was director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. A new Mendelssohn monument has been erected in front of the Gewandhaus, to replace the one destroyed by the Nazis in 1938.

  The pièce de resistance was the concert we attended — Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony doing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The audience went wild.

  On the way to Dresden, we made a detour to Weimar to see, among other things, Goethe’s house, which was supremely modest by today’s celebrity standards. We hadn’t realised that Buchenwald was only 8 km away. The people of Weimar supposedly had no idea what was going on there, although the street cleaners at that time wore the striped pyjamas of the concentration camp.

  The inner town of Baroque Dresden has been almost completely rebuilt. So much to see — the Semper Opera, the Albertina, which was full of exotica collected by the Saxon rulers, the old Masters’ Gallery in the Zwinger…

  But this trip was very different from the kind we’ve been used to, when we spent days or weeks in one place, talking to people and getting to know supermarkets, banks, post offices, toilets, ship chandlers and markets. Shall tell you more when we see you. We were kind of tired when we got back to Blomfield Road.

  Lots of love from Us Two

  ****

  The phone rang early one morning. It was Frank, our yacht broker in Marmaris, to tell us that Galatea had been sold. I thought we’d adjusted to the idea that our sailing days had ended. Felix seemed to take it remarkably well but at the end of that phone call I burst into tears.

  Some days later, Felix saw me slumped on the bed, clutching my head, and realised that this was no ordinary migraine. I remember being lifted into an ambulance, hearing people round my bed, and someone shining a torch into my eyes. I heard ‘…it’s probably meningitis,’ and Felix reply, ‘I’ll phone the children.’

  One morning I opened my eyes and saw Felix next to my hospital bed. ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘This is the third day. You’re better now. A neurologist has seen you and said it’s meningitis. The kids wanted to come, but you’re better now. Over the worst.’

  The day before I was discharged, the neurologist, a solemn man with rimless glasses, came to see me again.

  ‘Mrs Huber, you can go home tomorrow, but you won’t feel like your old self for quite a long time. You were very ill.’ During the following weeks, Felix did all the cooking and housework. The flat smelt of chicken soup.

  ‘Puss, your culinary repertoire is getting so good you’ll want to take over. Your chicken soup can compete with my grandmother’s cuisine.’

  But all this was taking its toll on Felix. His face was ashen, lined and thin.

  ‘Puss, are you all right? Your cough, it’s terrible.’

  ‘The past few weeks haven’t been easy. It’s been a big worry, but you’re OK now.’

  ‘I have to be OK for our 50th wedding anniversary family get-together in Umbria.’

  ‘It’s another six months to go. But the Borgo di Bastia has confirmed the booking.’

  We played at being upbeat.

  ****

  Dear Kids,

  I’m sure you’ve wondered how we feel about coming home to Sydney permanently. We’ve thought about it long and hard, and decided that for as long as it’s feasible, we’d like to spend six months of the year in London, and six in Sydney. Dad has lost much of his confidence, and knowing that he can no longer work would make being permanently in Sydney hard for him. Of course I haven’t told him that this is my reasoning. We love the idea of living in London half the
year, it’s no sacrifice. I’m sure you’ll understand. Meanwhile, I hope the history and photography courses will give him sufficient challenge and satisfaction.

  His cough plagues him. He’s been on different antibiotics but they don’t make much difference. The fact that he no longer needs to worry about me may improve his spirits, but it’s not going to affect his cough.

  I’m sorry this is a short note. Lots of love, Mum

  We found we enjoyed spending more time than we used to in our tiny flat. We liked being close, just as we had been on Galatea. When Felix went shopping I looked at my watch. ‘How long will you be?’

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Don’t be long.’

  My illness had made us conscious of how close the call had been, and although we rarely articulated it, we thought more frequently about death. Previously, when death had been a possibility, we were defiant, and beat it. We felt a sense of personal triumph and returned to our life on Galatea. Now there was no Galatea, and with each day, our time became more precious.

  Six months after my stay in hospital, when I still hadn’t fully recovered, Felix found a lump in my breast. He didn’t tell me until he’d arranged for an old friend, Michael Baume, a breast surgeon and professor at University College, to see me. Breast cancer had been in Felix’s area of expertise, so for a short time he reverted to his old confident self and I was glad to let him take over. He and Michael decided that I should have a mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy.

  ‘But what about our wedding anniversary, with the family in Umbria? We’re supposed to be there in less than three weeks.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll make it,’ Michael assured me. It hadn’t occurred to him that we’d be mad enough to drive, not fly, to Italy.

  I had the operation on a Wednesday and was home three days later. Felix had a supply of syringes to aspirate the fluid I was secreting in my chest. I surprised myself by how unconcerned I was. Perhaps this was because Felix was back in control.

  Two weeks later, we left at 6 am to make the 10 am shuttle to France. We drove through a lush spring landscape of poppies, weeping willows and poplars. It was late afternoon when we reached Troyes and found a hotel.